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Zombieland Still Heading to TV?

Ruben Fleischer made it pretty clear recently that Zombieland 2 isn’t happening any time soon, but is that because the fabled television series is still in development? io9 found a casting call issued Thursday that seems to imply a show is going into production.

The characters described in the series and in the script pages io9 also found are slightly different than their big-screen counterparts. It seems like the Zombieland TV show, if it happens, will use the movie as a basis but create its own identity.

Here is how the characters are being portrayed, according to io9:

Tallahassee is still kind of a snarky weirdo, but he seems to have a much less spiky relationship with Columbus. He and Columbus have a pretty amusing thing where they riff on the fact that Steven Seagal movies always have three-word titles like “Marked for Justice” or “May Cause Diarrhea.” But Tallahassee also dispenses homespun wisdom about how to feel happy with your life. He also tells a weird story about being in a trailer park with a perpetually nude Matthew McConaughey. He also has a somewhat heartwarming scene where he tells Columbus that he’s been wandering aimlessly for a long time, but maybe he’s been put here for a reason — to help Columbus and the others.

Columbus is much the same, except that he tracks down his grandma and grandpa (Bubbie and Peepaw) only to find them recently zombiefied. Also, Columbus is trying to deal with his newfound relationship with Wichita, after their first kiss. He has started calling her “Krista,” her real name — but there are some problems, especially after she finds him reading a book about fatherhood. He tries to organize a romantic scavenger hunt for her in the IKEA they’re camping out in, but it goes kind of horribly.

Wichita is still trying to look after Little Rock, trying to teach her math with problems about someone stealing from a liquor store and jumping on a train going 42 miles per hour, with a cop chasing in a car going 88 miles per hour. We also learn a lot more about Wichita’s backstory, including how she ran away from her father after he had her stealing people’s Christmas presents — and later, she found out she had a sister who was also being a grifter with her dad.

Little Rock seems actually kind of excited about meeting Columbus’ grandparents, before they turn out to be zombies. And she shares some of her own backstory, about how her dad parked her at a school while he went off grifting on his own — and then yanked her out of school right before a dance that she was looking forward to.

Fred and Ainsley are two office workers at the start of the zombie apocalypse, obliviously complaining about problems with their iPhones and getting the wrong order at Starbucks, which they admit are “first world problems” with a hashtag — while people are being disembowled just outside the window they’re not facing. Tallahassee shows up to bring them their lunch orders, wearing a green polo shirt.

When Fleisher recently gave a status update on Zombieland 2, he said there is no script for the movie and added that he couldn’t come up with a story he was thrilled about. With that being said, Fleischer made it clear that he would not “put a nail in that coffin” when it came to a Zombieland sequel.

Talk of the TV series last surfaced in October 2011, when it was said screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick were planning to develop a half-hour comedy with Fox and Sony Pictures Television. It turns out that Zombieland was originally envisioned for television — hence the movie’s “Zombie Kill of the Week” — but after it was unable to find a home at CBS and then Syfy, the project eventually found its way on the big screen.